What is Business Continuity Plan (BCP)?
A Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is a documented strategy for keeping an organization's essential functions running during and after a disruption such as a cyberattack, outage, or natural disaster. It covers people, processes, facilities, and technology, and defines recovery priorities, roles, and communication so critical operations survive the event.
A business continuity plan matters because disruptions are a question of when, not if, and unplanned downtime causes lost revenue, broken commitments, and reputational harm. A BCP identifies which functions are critical, how long they can be down, and the steps to keep them — or quickly resume them — when something goes wrong.
For example, after a regional power outage, a company with a BCP shifts staff to remote work, redirects phone lines, and follows pre-agreed priorities so order processing continues while less critical functions pause.
Much of continuity planning is documentation: a business impact analysis, recovery priorities with target timeframes, contact trees, and tested procedures. A template provides that structure and the sections auditors and enterprise customers expect, so you fill in your functions and dependencies rather than design the plan from nothing. The documents speed audit-readiness; testing the plan and being able to execute it is what actually keeps the business running.
Related terms: Disaster Recovery (DR) · Incident Response · Risk Assessment · Security Control
Frequently asked questions
- What is the difference between a BCP and a disaster recovery plan?
- A business continuity plan covers keeping the whole organization's critical functions running — people, processes, and facilities. Disaster recovery is the IT-focused subset that restores systems, applications, and data. DR is part of, and supports, the broader BCP.
- What are RTO and RPO?
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the maximum acceptable time to restore a function after disruption. Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the maximum acceptable amount of data loss, measured in time. Both are set during a business impact analysis and guide continuity and recovery planning.
Toolkits that cover Business Continuity Plan (BCP)
ISO 27001 Complete Toolkit
All 24 policies and procedures plus the risk register, 93-control Statement of Applicability and audit evidence checklist — audit-ready from day one.
NIST CSF 2.0 Complete Toolkit
15 editable policies and plans covering all six CSF 2.0 functions, plus a Profile & Assessment workbook with every one of the 106 subcategories, a risk register, and an audit evidence checklist.
SOC 2 Complete Toolkit
22 policies plus the risk register, full Trust Services Criteria mapping and audit evidence checklist — built for startups facing their first SOC 2.
Learn more in our ISO/IEC 27001 guide, explore the editable policy templates, or browse the full compliance glossary.